7. Olivia #2
Except my brain doesn't wait. It never waits. Three years of emergency medicine wired it to run the debrief whether I want it to or not — the automatic, merciless replay of what happened, what didn't, what should have.
I try to just breathe but instead I'm in my head, back on the platforms, counting the jumps, measuring the distance, running the same numbers I've been running since our very first attempt.
We have to go faster.
Except we've been going faster. Each attempt cleaner than the last. The platform rhythm is in our bodies now. We've shaved seconds off the crossing, real seconds… and it hasn't mattered.
The final rumble arrives at the same point regardless — not because we're too slow, but because the interval is fixed and the lake is too wide and we've been running harder at a problem that can't be solved by running harder.
Then faster isn't the answer.
I know that. I feel it before I can prove it, the way I used to know in the ER when I'd treated the symptom three times and the patient kept crashing — not a failure of execution, a failure of diagnosis. Wrong problem. Different question.
So what's the right question?
I reach for it. My mind turns it over, drops it, picks up something else — the image of Varketh moving through the lava, patient, unhurried, heat running off him like rain.
The way the platform glided when the first attempt went wrong and we rode it sideways.
The pull in my chest when we're close to the relic, that triangular tug between me and Kaelor and the thing at the far end of the lake?—
The shape of something grazes the edge of my thinking and dissolves before I can catch it.
I exhale.
Not yet. It's not there yet.
“Five.”
The countdown ticks down. Halfway already. I drop my arm from my eyes and stare at the ceiling. The cool air and the pale light of the terminal chamber offer me nothing useful. What I expected. The answer isn't in here.
I sit up.
Across the chamber, Kaelor is already on his feet.
He finds me immediately — he always finds me immediately, that's just what he does, some fixed point in him that orients toward me the moment the pod opens.
He checks me over in that way he has, thorough and fast and trying not to look like he's doing it.
I watch his shoulders drop a fraction when he finds me whole .
I look away before he can see my face.
He'll want to know if I have something. A plan, a pivot, anything new. And I don't — not yet, just the ghost of a shape and a feeling I can't name. Nothing but the absolute certainty that we're one variable away from cracking this… if I can just find the right angle.
I'm not ready to show him empty hands.
The floor shunts open. And my pod begins to fall.
Whatever the answer is, it's out there. In the arena, on the platforms, watching the problem from the inside.
We're already running when he tells me.
Hand in mine. Feet hitting stone. The corridor blurring past. He says it the way you say something you've been carrying too long — flat, like he's just setting it down.
"There are five," he says. "Every time. Five rumbles before the volcano erupts."
I look at him.
"You counted them?"
"Every attempt." A beat. "Always five."
Every attempt. While I was focused on the next platform, the next jump, the heat on my face and the lava below and staying alive through one more second — he was counting?!
I don't know why that hits me. It just does.
The first number lands. Then the second. Then the lake width, the platform count, our speed together across the crossing — and the answer arrives like a door closing.
It doesn't work.
I run it again. Faster jumps. Tighter landings. Us moving better than we've ever moved. The fifth shudder still hits before we reach the far platform. Every version. Every adjustment.
Same answer.
I don't say it. I keep my face forward and my grip even. I breathe through it as the archway comes and we cross into Arena Three. The familiar heat hits my face and I look at the lake differently now. Not as a crossing. As an equation. A broken one.
The first platform is ten yards ahead. And the solution suddenly hits me.
I pull him back.
He turns. Reads my expression. "What?"
"Go alone," I say. "You're faster without me?—"
"No."
"Half the time on the crossing, maybe more?—"
"It’ll do no good. We both need to activate the relic."
"If you reach it first. Start the process. Maybe it will buy us some time."
He shakes his head. He's already run this version. It failed before I thought of it.
Behind us the rivals are clearing the archway. Boots heavy on stone.
"Then what?" My voice comes out harder than I mean it to. "Tell me what other choice we have. Because going together doesn't work and going alone doesn't work and we’re?—"
"I know," he growls.
He’s angry, but not at me.
Honestly, it's worse than if he'd shouted it.
He looks at the lake. At the relic in the distance, patient and indifferent. His jaw tightens once and releases. That's all. Just that — one small movement that tells me everything the Games have cost him and everything he's still willing to pay.
He turns to me.
His hands find my face, gently stroking my cheek.
He presses his forehead to mine and I close my eyes.
There's one breath — his, mine, I can't tell — and the heat of the arena and the sound of the rivals and the fixed, breaking math of this place all exist somewhere outside the small space between us.
Then he lets go.
Steps back.
Turns.
And runs.
I've seen him move fast before. I didn't understand what that meant until now.
He's already on the second platform before I reach the first. The third before I've corrected my landing. He moves like the lake isn't a variable — like the platforms are just ground and the lava is just distance and none of it applies to him the way it applies to everything else.
I run as fast as I can.
It's not fast enough. It was never going to be fast enough. I knew that before we started and I ran anyway because there was nothing else to do.
First platform. Second. Behind me the rival males flood through the archway — I hear them, don't look back. The heat presses up from below and ash falls and the lake churns.
The ground shakes.
One .
I jump and land and jump again and I keep my eyes on Kaelor because he's the fixed point, the only one that matters. Third platform. Fourth. He's so far ahead I can barely track him — a dark shape moving fast across the surface, already halfway across while I'm still finding my footing.
RUMBLE.
Two.
Fifth platform. Sixth. My lungs are burning and the ash is thick and a boulder hits the lake surface twenty meters to my left and lava sprays upward and I flinch and keep going.
He reaches the far platform.
I'm not even halfway.
The ground shakes again.
Three.
I watch him find the relic. Cross to it. Place both hands on it and go still, the full force of him focused on that single point.
Annnd… nothing happens.
He lifts his hands. Tries again.
Nothing.
Damn it. I hate it when he's right.
He turns and finds me across the lake. His face does something I've never seen it do. The stillness cracks, just for a second, just enough. His eyes move from me to the distance between us and back again.
He's lost hope. And it's because of me. Because I'm not good enough.
That look hits harder than anything the arena has thrown at me.
RUMBLE.
Four.
One left .
I push harder. My lungs are burning and the next platform tilts badly. I go down to one knee, stone hot under my palm, and I'm up again before I've decided to move.
Keep going, Olivia!
The rivals are closer behind me. The relic platform is still impossibly far ahead. The math has not changed and I cannot fix make it in time. I keep running anyway because stopping is the only thing that's definitely wrong.
Something surfaces in the lava ahead of me.
I stop.
Varketh rises until his shoulders clear the surface. Lava sheets off him. He stands in the middle of the lake like it was made for him, like he's been waiting here patiently while the rest of us burned. He is enormous, and still. And watching me.
He raises his hands.
His eyes go to Kaelor on the far platform. Then back to me. Then to the distance between us — all those platforms, all that heat, the one shudder left before the world ends again.
I don't lower my fists. Not that there’s much I can do with them.
Varketh stands in the lava and watches me with those pale, flat eyes and doesn't move. Behind me the rivals are closing — I can hear them, two platforms away, the stone tilting under their weight, the scramble of boots finding purchase. Somewhere across the lake Kaelor screams my name.
He's enormous. I knew that already. But out here in the open, standing in the middle of a lava lake like it's a shallow puddle, the scale of him is different.
The heat that would strip my skin in seconds without this crown runs off him in waves and he doesn't register it.
Doesn't blink. Just stands there with his hands raised and waits.
"There is only one way you reach him in time," he says.
He lets that sit.
"And you already know it isn't running."
Huh?
"The ones who run these Games," he says, pacing the platform now. I have to shift to stop myself from going over the side. "They want to be entertained."
"I know what the Malquarans want."
"Then you know what I want." He stops, hands behind his back. "I help you win. I become the thing they didn't expect. Maybe that's enough to bring me back for another Mating Games."
I look at his face.
I look at it carefully — the way I looked at it the last time he stood in front of me and said something that sounded true. I remember that arena. I remember exactly what his sincerity cost me. I'm looking for the difference between then and now and I'm not finding one.